The Sources of Greek Art

ON
condition that we respect ruins, that we do not rebuild them, that, after
having asked their secret, we let them be recovered by the ashes of the
centuries, the bones of the dead, the rising mass of waste which once was
vegetations and races, the eternal drapery of the foliage—their destiny may
stir our emotion. It is through them that we touch the depths of our history,
just as we are bound to the roots of life by the griefs and sufferings which
have formed us. A ruin is painful to behold only for the man who is incapable
of participating by his activity in the conquest of the present.

There
is no more virile luxury than that of asking our past griefs how they were able
to determine our present actions. There is no more virile luxury than that of
demanding, from the imprints of those who prepared our present dwelling, the
why of the thing that we are. A statue coming all moist out of the earth, a
rusted jewel, or a bit of pottery bearing the trace of painting is a witness
which tells us much more about ourselves than about the bygone men who uttered
this testimony. Art lives in the future. It is the fruit of the pain, desires,
and hopes of the people, and the promise contained in these feelings does not
reach its slow realization until later, in the new needs of the crowds; it is
our emotion which tells us if the old presentiments of men did not deceive
them.

If we
are so troubled by the rude idols, the jewels, the vases, the pieces of
bas-reliefs, and the effaced paintings which we have found at Knossos in Crete,
at Tirynth and Mycenae in Argolis, it is precisely because those who left them
are more mysterious to us than the things themselves, and because it is
comforting for us to realize, through these unknown beings, that under the
variation of appearances and the renewal of symbols, emotion and intelligence
never change in quality. Through the continuing action, even when obscure and
without history, of the generations which have formed us, the soul of the old
peoples lives in ours. But they participate in our own adventure only if their
silent spirit still animates the stone faces in which we recognize our
eternally young desires, or if we hear the sound of their passage over the
earth in the crumbling of the temples which they raised. Egypt, and Chaldea
itself, through Assyria and Persia which prolong their life till our time, cast
their shadow at our steps. They will never seem to us very far away. Primitive
Greece, on the contrary, which does not enter the world until centuries after
them, retreats much farther back in the imagination, to the very morning of
history. Twenty years ago we did not know whether the almost effaced imprints,
noted here and there on the shores and islands of the Aegean Sea, had belonged
to men or to fabled shadows. It was necessary to hollow out the soil, to
unearth the stones, and to cease from seeing only ourselves in them, in order
to catch a glimpse of the phantom humanity which, before the time of history,
peopled the eastern Mediterranean. Schliemann, who took Homer at his word,
excavated in the plain off Argos from Tirynth to Mycenae. Mr. Evans entered the
labyrinth of Minos in Crete where Theseus killed the Minotaur. Myth and history
entangle themselves. Now the symbol sums up a hundred events of the same order;
now the real event, representative of a whole series of customs, ideas, and
adventures, seems to us to put on the garb of a symbolic fiction [Victor Bérard, Les Phéniciens et L’Odysée].

Is it
the body of Agamemnon that Schliemann found, buried in gold, under the Agora of
Mycenae, and is the Ilissalrik of the Dardanelles the Troy of Homer? What
matter? Between Abraham and Moses, in the time when Thebes dominated Egypt, the
Aegean Sea was alive. The Phoenicians had advanced from island to island,
awakening to the life of exchange the tribes of fishermen who peopled the
Cyclades, Samos, Lesbos, Chios, Rhodes — the rocks sprinkled broadcast in the
sparkling sea from the mountains of Crete and of the Peloponnesus to the gulfs
of Asia Minor. Through them the sensual and cruel spirit of the Orient and the
secret spirit of the peoples of the Nile had fertilized the waves. Danaos came
from Egypt, Pelops from Asia, Cadmus from Phoenicia.

From
fishing, coast trade, the small business of one isle with another, from rapine
and piracy, a whole little moving world of sailors, merchants, and corsairs
lived their healthy life, neither a rich nor a poor one—a mean one—if we think
of the vast commercial enterprises and the great explorations which the
Phoenicians undertook. Their feet in the water and their faces to the wind, the
men of the Aegean would carry to the traffickers from Tyre and Sidon who had
just entered the port, under blue, green, and red sails, their fish and their
olives in vases painted with marine plants, octopuses, seaweed, and other forms
taken from the teeming, viscous life of the deep. It needed centuries,
doubtless, for the tribes of a single island or a single coast to recognize a
chief, to consent to follow him afar on cunning and bloody expeditions to the
cities of the continent, whence they brought back jewels, golden vessels, rich
stuffs, and women. And it was only then that the Achaians and the Danai of the
old poems heaped up those heavy stones on the fortified promontories, the
Cyclopean walls, the Pelasgic walls under the shadow of which the Atrides,
crowned with gold like the barbarian kings who sallied forth from the forests
of the north two thousand years later, sat at table before the meats and wines,
with their friends and their soldiers.

Such
origins could not but make them subtle and hard. Aeschylus felt this when he
came there, after eight centuries, to listen in the solitude to the echo of the
death cries of the frightful family. These pirates selected sites for their
lair near the sea—tragically consistent with their life of murder and the heavy
orgies which followed upon their deeds of crime. A circle of hills—bare,
devoured by fire and enlivened by no torrent, no tree, no bird cry. We find the
life of these men depicted on the sides of the rudely chiseled vase of Vaphio,
and on the strips of wall remaining beneath the ruins of Tirynth and of
Knossos. There are bits of frescoes there as free as the flight of the sea
birds; the art is of a terrible candor, but is already disintegrating. One sees
women with bare breasts, rouge on their lips, black around the eyes, their
flounced dresses betraying the bad taste of the barbarian; they are painted and
sophisticated dolls bought in the Orient or taken by force on the expeditions
of violence. Here are bulls pursued in the olive groves, bulls galloping,
rearing, charging upon men or tangled in great nets. Sometimes there are
reapers who laugh and sing with tremendous gayety among the sheaves of wheat
which they carry, but usually we find the questionable woman, the wild beast,
and the marine monster; a voluptuous and brutal life like that of every
primitive man raised to a post of command by force or by chance. As guardians
of the gates of their acropolis they set up stone lionesses with bronze heads,
heavily erect. When they died these men were laid away in a shroud of gold leaf.
. .

It was
a civilization already rotten, a Byzantium in miniature, where dramas of the
bedroom determined revolutions and massacres. It ended like the others. The
Dorian descends from the north like an avalanche, rolls over Argolis and even
to Crete, devastating the cities and razing the acropolises. Legendary Greece
enters a thick darkness from which she would not have reappeared if the
barbarians had not left, intact under the conflagration, such material
testimony of her passage through history as the kings with the masks of gold.
The Phoenicians desert the coast of the Peloponnesus, of Attica, and of Crete,
and the native populations, dispersed like a city of bees on which a host of
wasps has descended, swarm in every direction, on the shores of Asia, in
Sicily, and in southern Italy. Silence reigns around continental Greece. It was
to be two or three hundred years before the Phoenicians and the Achaians,
driven away by the invasion, could get back the route to its gulfs.